Killer is Dead seems like it’s shaping up to be a Suda 51 fan’s dream. Swords, assassins, Yakuza, tigers, all sorts of weird shit. The Grasshopper Manufacture founder has been talking about the game in some detail among the pages of this week’s Famitsu. It sounds insane.

Speaking with the magazine, Suda said, “One thing we got to do with this game, is you fighting against a yakuza guy riding a tiger. You’re in Kyoto, among all these old-style buildings, and [hero] Mondo is on this motorbike fighting against a yakuza on a tiger!

“And the game’s packed with these sorts of situations, the kind you won’t see in any other game. That Kyoto battle got concepted out surprisingly early on, too; I guess we felt like overseas gamers ought to see what Kyoto looks like.”

Suda also made clear that hero Mondo is not an assassin, “Mondo’s an executioner, not an assassin. You have that ‘execution’ nuance added to the act of murdering your foes. The hero’s job is to wipe out these serious villains, real AAA-class international terrorists.

“He’s dressed so smartly that you might wonder if he’s actually capable of killing, but once the ‘work’ switch is pulled, his aura completely turns around. The story depicts him as a man who just does his job without putting much of any emotion into it.”

On the game’s wonderfully ‘Killer7′ visual style, Suda explained, “We tried going for more realistic visuals at first. But it just didn’t produce the sort of unique expression we wanted with this game. So we turned it all around.

“I think Killer7 was the best we could do in art expression at the time it came out, but if we just recreated that, it’d merely seem old at this point. So we really pursued an art style that seemed modern with our shading technology. There was a lot of trial and error behind what you see now.”